Maine

Maine
Location	United States
Type	State
Appearances	HPL: "The Ghost-Eater"

Maine is a state in the New England region of the United States. It is featured in Lovecraft's fiction, including in two revision tales, and has been used as a setting by other Cthulhu Mythos writers. Lovecraft appears to have made only one brief visit to the state.

Maine was the last of the New England states to be admitted to the union, in 1820; it is by far the largest, at 35,380 square miles more than three times the size of Massachusetts. Its population in 1930 was 797,423, and 1,362,359 in 2020, making it the least densely populated state east of the Mississippi River. Its capital is Augusta; its largest city is Portland, which had 70,000 residents in 1930.

Lovecraft visited Portland, Maine, in August 1927, visiting Vermont, New Hampshire, and several towns in Massachusetts on the same trip.

In Lovecraft's Fiction

Arguably the most notable reference to Maine in Lovecraft's fiction is in "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937). After his marriage to Asenath Waite, Edward Pickman Derby "talk[s] about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets". Later, his friend Daniel Upton gets a telegram from the town marshal of Chesuncook, Maine, telling him that Derby had "stumbled out of the woods with delirious ravings."

Chesuncook is a real-world town in the Maine Wilderness; in 1933, it had fewer than 70 residents. Lovecraft describes it, accurately enough, as "close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine." Derby's rants depict it as a fearsome site of eldritch horror:

The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there. . . . Iä! Shub-Niggurath! . . . The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled. . . . The Hooded Thing bleated ‘Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s secret name in the coven. . . . I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t take me. . . . A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate. . . . I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . .

While Derby is understandably eager to get out of Maine, he is heard "muttering darkly to himself" when the route home passes through Augusta, and later Portland--"as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories." When the Asenath/Ephraim personality regains control of Derby's body, it tries to explain away the rant about Chesuncook: "There are certain Indian relics in the north woods—standing stones, and all that—which mean a good deal in folklore, and Asenath and I are following that stuff up."

Maine was also the setting for two stories Lovecraft reworked for revision clients. "The Green Meadow" (1927), written with Winifred V. Jackson, the story is presented as an Ancient Greek manuscript found in a meteorite that lands in the ocean near "the small seaside village of Potowonket, Maine"--a fictional community. The story itself appears to be set on an alien planet.

Maine gets a more extensive treatment in "The Ghost-Eater" (1924), which Lovecraft wrote with C. M. Eddy, Jr. It tells of the narrator's journey from Mayfair to Glendale, two fictional towns in Maine, through a forest he later learns are known as the Devil's Woods. For unspecified reasons, the traveler needs to get to Glendale by noon the next day; he notes, "Unless I took the long route through Potowisset, which would not bring me to my goal in time, there would be dense forests to penetrate." (Potowisset is another invented town.)

There is not much description of scenery in the story, though Glendale (which is due north of Mayfair) gets a brief sketch:

Sunrise found me on the hill at the edge of the woods, with the steepled village outspread below me, and the blue thread of the Cataqua sparkling in the distance.... I picked my way down hill and through the narrow streets with their flagstone sidewalks and Colonial doorways till I reached the Lafayette House....

The Cataqua River is also imaginary; its name seems modeled on Chautauqua, the name of a lake, county, and town in upstate New York.

The house in Devil's Woods where the traveler meets the ghost of the werewolf Vasili Oukranikov is described as "a neat and tasteful little house of two stories; some seventy years old by its architecture, yet still in a state of repair betokening the closest and most civilized attention."

Other Mythos Writers

There is a seemingly tossed-off reference to Maine in Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936), which says that the protagonist Robert Blake "had begun his long-planned novel—based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine—but was strangely unable to make progress with it." This is a reference to Blake's real-world counterpart, Robert Bloch, who in 1935 was working on a story called "Satan's Servants", about an isolated village of devil worshippers in colonial New England. Lovecraft read an early draft of the story and enthusiastically offered plentiful suggestions, including moving the story's invented village of Roodsford from Massachusetts to Maine--"the only place on the coast where a village could exist relatively unknown," Lovecraft insisted. He even sent Bloch a map with his suggested location marked, between the towns of York and Wells. (This is approximately the site of the town of Ogunquit.)

Stephen King, whose imaginary Maine landscape rivals Lovecraft Country in its detail, placed one of his handful of explicitly Mythos-connected stories in Maine. "Jerusalem's Lot" (1978) is set in an ancestral home called Chapelwaite, which "sits atop a huge and jutting point of land perhaps three miles north of Falmouth and nine miles north of Portland," and in the nearby abandoned village of Jerusalem's Lot, which is to the southeast of Chapelwaite, "not two miles" from Preacher's Corners, the nearest village to the house.

The Hugo Award-winning Cthulhu Mythos story "Shoggoths in Bloom" (2008), by Elizabeth Bear, is set in the imaginary town of Passamaquoddy, which is located on the real-world body of water of Penobscot Bay (not to be confused with Passamaquoddy Bay, which is more than 100 miles up the coast from Penobscot Bay). The 1977 Disney film Pete's Dragon, which is also about a large, semi-invisible fantastic creature that turns out to be friendlier than it first appears, is also set in a fictional Maine town named Passamaquoddy.